Shockingly violent coffee commercials starring Muppets

Russell Bates says: "Check out these late-50s commercials for a Washington DC coffee company, starring early iterations of the Muppets doing violent things to each other"

From 1957 to 1961, Henson made 179 commercials for Wilkins Coffee and other Wilkins products, including Community Coffee and Wilkins Tea. The ads were so successful and well-liked that they sparked a series of remakes for companies in other local markets throughout the 1960s.
The ads starred the cheerful Wilkins, who liked Wilkins Coffee, and the grumpy Wontkins, who hated it. Wilkins would often do serious harm to Wontkins in the ads -- blowing him up, stabbing him with a knife, and smashing him with a club, among many other violent acts.

These ads bring back bad memories of a muppets retrospective type program that was on the TV a few time in the late 80s, early 90s when I was a child. It had a few old violent clips in it and I remember being absolutely terrified of them, and also a bit confused about why the muppets were being mean to each other :(

I think “shockingly” refers less to the actual violence and more to the context- Muppet on Muppet. If Kermit The Frog shivved Gonzo it’d be a bit “shocking”- unexpected.

Imagine the Teletubbies slapping each other around, maybe shooting each other. Not “shockingly violent” perhaps, but shocking violence (barring some wry commentary from someone who “saw it coming what with all the telltale signs of repressed aggression in the previous episodes”.)

This came from the era of the three stooges and televised vaudeville, and was intended to be slapstick not violent. Not really shocking when you realize that some of the same schtick appeared in The Muppet Show. It’s just that we expect our TV commercials to be politically correct.

@apoxia: I think I saw the same Muppets retrospective as a young ‘un, mid 80s. That clip of the piano eating proto-Kermit unsettled some deep, dark memories. Mainly of wondering why the hell a piano just ate a Muppet.

There’s an old saying about the Muppets that there are only 3 ways to end a sketch – blow something up, have one character eat another, or start tossing animals in the air.

Please. The Muppets != Sesame St. Muppets were always designed for adult audiences and adult humor. The Henson exhibit at the Smithsonian last year had some fabulous Muppet commercials – the best part is because of local TV, the products in the ads were pretty much interchangeable for different markets.

Shocking is a very strong word to use here. Maybe “surprisingly violent” would have been more accurate. Because I wasn’t expecting to see that, but it didn’t leave me feeling offended.

The ads were pretty good, really. To be so brief, they managed to convey what the product is, and in a brief moment of absurd, puppet-based violence, they conveyed the tremendous value of their product. You don’t see such creativity very often, nowadays.

In other words, if this actually shocks any of you, then maybe you need to unclinch your ass and try to laugh once in awhile.

It wasn’t the violence itself that I found “shocking,” but the tactic of threatening the viewer. “Drink our coffee or we will physically hurt you!” is a bit surprising, to me at least. I have seen many ads growing up with the TV and the Internet, but in none of them was a cannon turned to point at the camera menacingly.

There was a Henson retrospective at the Smithsonian a few months back, and it had this and other commercials. The previous posts about interchanging products aren’t altogether wrong. There was another one that was effectively the same ad, but for bread. The non-bread muppet got shot with a cannon hidden in a breadbox[0].

Seriously, I wish we could have a few ads that are this incredibly out there and simple. GEICO occasionally comes close (not the money though, wtf?), except they have a huge marketing budget behind it. And well, I suppose there’s Burger King’s attempt, but yeah, the king scares the bejeezus out of me.